Microsoft Azure Stack is an extension of Azure—bringing the agility and innovation of cloud computing to your on-premises environment and enabling the only hybrid cloud that allows you to build and deploy hybrid applications anywhere. We bring together the best of the edge and cloud to deliver Azure services anywhere in your environment.

Today, I’m incredibly excited to announce that the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now generally available. We are also adding five new regions including Australia East, UK South, West US, West US 2, and North Europe. AKS is now generally available in ten regions across three continents, and we expect to add ten more regions in the coming months!

With AKS in all these regions, users from around the world, or with applications that span the world, can deploy and manage their production Kubernetes applications with the confidence that Azure's engineers are providing constant monitoring, operations, and support for our customers’ fully managed Kubernetes clusters. Azure was also the first cloud to offer a free managed Kubernetes Service and we continue to offer it for free in GA. We think you should be able to use Kubernetes without paying for our management infrastructure.

Going from preview to general availability requires dedication and hard work by both the AKS engineering team as well as the customers who volunteered their time and patience to try out our new service. I'm extremely grateful to everyone inside and outside of Microsoft who contributed their time to improving AKS and making the general availability possible. The product that we ship today is better because of your hard work. Thank you!

The Kubernetes API is just the beginning. From its inception, a core component of Microsoft's DNA has been building the platforms to empower and enable developers to become more productive. It has been awesome to see this heritage pull through into a new generation of tools to enable builders of cloud native applications. As we showed this past May at the Microsoft Build conference, Azure is the most complete and capable cloud for cloud native application development. On Azure, our tools make it easier to build and debug your containerized applications with Kubernetes. To make this even better, we're excited to announce even more features now available in all AKS regions including Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC), Azure Active Directory based identity, the ability to deploy clusters into pre-existing custom virtual networks, and more. Furthermore, you can even deploy and manage your clusters using both open source tools like Terraform and Azure's own Resource Manager templates. Come check them out!

In addition to making Azure an industry leading place to run Kubernetes, we are also strongly committed to giving back to the Kubernetes user community, no matter where they want to run Kubernetes. To that end:

Additionally, with our work on the virtual kubelet, we are leading a cross-industry effort that brings Kubernetes management to environments without VMs using innovative technology like Azure Container Instances.

All of this work wouldn't mean anything unless we delivered a useful service that meets users where they are and enables them to achieve great things. It's awesome to see companies like Siemens and Varian Health find success using Kubernetes on Azure.

As proud as I am about everything that the Azure Kubernetes team has done to get us to this point, I'm even more excited to see what production applications our customers build on top of our production-grade, worldwide Azure Kubernetes Service. As for the team, we're already hard at work on the next set of exciting features for all our AKS users and Kubernetes friends around the world!